The work of László Krasznahorkai has been arriving in English at a steady rate since the early 2000s, principally in versions by George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet, and the work's establishment in the Anglophone literary world is now substantial enough that the formal phrase international Booker laureate serves as a usable shorthand for many readers who have not yet read a sentence of his prose. The work's reputation has, in significant measure, preceded the work itself in English, and the gap between reputation and direct reading is, with this writer particularly, larger than the standard reception tends to acknowledge. Krasznahorkai is also, importantly, a writer whose English existence is wholly mediated by a small number of translators whose interpretive choices have shaped, perhaps more than is the case for most writers in translation, what he can mean in the receiving language.
This piece is an attempt to look at that mediation directly — at what the translators are working with, at what the choices they have made imply for the English versions, and at what the English versions consequently make possible and what they perhaps obscure. The translators' work is, in most respects, extraordinary; the aim is not to question the achievement but to make the achievement legible, since the existing Anglophone criticism has rarely treated translation as part of its proper subject.
The Hungarian sentence and what it does
Krasznahorkai's prose is built on the long sentence — sentences that frequently extend across whole pages, that incorporate multiple subordinations, that hold a single grammatical movement open across paragraph-length spans of text. The long sentence is not a stylistic affectation; it is the structural feature through which the prose accomplishes its specific effects. The Krasznahorkai long sentence builds a kind of cumulative pressure that depends on the sentence's refusal to terminate. The reader is held inside the sentence, in a specific relation to the unfolding clauses, and the experience of being held there — without the periodic relief of sentence-end — is the basic experiential effect that the prose is designed to produce.
The Hungarian language permits sentence constructions of this length more easily than English does. Hungarian is an agglutinative language with substantial flexibility in clause-ordering and with grammatical resources that allow for sustained subordination without the structural awkwardness that the same operations would produce in English. The Hungarian Krasznahorkai sentence, while exceptional in its sustained length, sits within a linguistic system that supports the form. The English translation has to do the same work in a language that resists it.
The translators have responded to this challenge in ways that are recognisable across the body of translated work. The English Krasznahorkai sentence is long but not, generally, as long as the Hungarian original. The translators have permitted themselves occasional terminations that the original does not contain, breaking sentences at points where the English would otherwise become syntactically unworkable. They have substituted, in places, the comma-splice and the semicolon for full subordination, producing a sentence-shape that approximates the Hungarian effect without violating English grammatical convention beyond what the receiving language can absorb. The result is a Krasznahorkai who is recognisable but slightly modified, a writer whose long-sentence effect operates in English through somewhat different means than the original deploys.
What the English versions have produced
The English versions have produced, importantly, a Krasznahorkai whom the Anglophone reader can actually read. The translators' interpretive labour is what makes the work available, and the availability is the precondition for whatever criticism and reception the work has produced in English. To complain that the translations are not the originals is to misunderstand what translation can be. The translations are the only Krasznahorkai that most Anglophone readers will encounter, and the achievement of the translators is to have made an encounter with this particular writer possible at all.
The Szirtes versions — The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War, several of the more recent translations — show a translator working with a specific sense of the prose's metaphysical register. Szirtes is a poet, and his versions have a sentence-rhythm that registers the music of the Hungarian where a more literal translation would lose it. The cost is occasional adjustments in the more denotative content of clauses; the gain is a Krasznahorkai whose prose has, in English, a recognisable musicality that is, in its specific kind, the writer's own.
The Mulzet versions — Seiobo There Below, The Last Wolf, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, the magisterial Herscht 07769 — show a different translator operating with a different set of priorities. Mulzet is more attentive to what one might call the syntactic philosophy of the Hungarian original; her sentences hold the long-form structure with more rigour, and the English she produces is more demanding in ways that map more directly onto the Hungarian demand. Mulzet's Krasznahorkai is less domesticated than Szirtes's, and the comparison between the two translators' work is itself a piece of useful evidence about what Krasznahorkai's prose can be made to do in English.
The differences between the English and the Hungarian
The differences between the English Krasznahorkai and what the Hungarian critical literature describes the original as doing are worth being honest about. The Hungarian Krasznahorkai is, by all accounts, a denser writer than the English versions can fully convey. The cultural references — to specific moments in Hungarian post-1989 social experience, to specific religious and folkloric traditions, to specific argotic and dialect registers — operate in the Hungarian originals at a level that English translation can only partially preserve. The translators' annotations, where they have provided them, do useful work, but the experiential effect of reading the Hungarian — for a reader within the Hungarian cultural frame — is not entirely available to the Anglophone reader, and the criticism should acknowledge this.
The political register of the original is also more specific than the English versions can fully transmit. Krasznahorkai is a writer of a particular Central European post-communist sensibility, with allegiances and antagonisms that have specific local meaning, and the English-language reception has tended to read these political meanings in registers that are recognisable to Anglophone readers — registers of vague apocalyptic anxiety, of generalised civilisational weariness — that are not entirely the registers in which the originals were operating. The English Krasznahorkai is a more universalised writer than the Hungarian Krasznahorkai is, and the universalisation is one of the things translation has done.
The musicality of the prose, the formal philosophical density, the sustained structural ambition — these have been more successfully preserved than the specific cultural and political content. The English versions deliver the formal experience of reading Krasznahorkai with considerable fidelity. They deliver the cultural content with reduced fidelity. The combination produces an English Krasznahorkai who is, in important respects, his own writer, distinct from the Hungarian original while being unmistakably derived from it.
What this implies for how we read
The implication, for the Anglophone reader of Krasznahorkai, is that the work being read is a genuinely collaborative production between the writer and the translators, and that the criticism of the work should treat the collaboration seriously. The translators' interpretive choices are part of what produces the literary effect. The Krasznahorkai sentence in English is, in part, Szirtes's sentence and Mulzet's sentence, with Krasznahorkai's structural and conceptual originals as the basis on which the English sentences have been constructed. To read the work seriously is to attend to this collaboration, and to be willing to talk about the translators as working artists in the production of the work that the Anglophone reader actually encounters.
The contemporary criticism of translated literature has often failed to do this attending. The standard reviewing convention is to mention the translator briefly in a parenthesis or in an acknowledgment near the end of the review, with no substantive discussion of the translator's interpretive work. The convention treats translation as a kind of transparent operation, with the translator's labour invisible and the work's English existence treated as if it were the work itself. This is wrong on the facts, and it produces criticism that cannot describe what is actually in front of it.
The criticism of Krasznahorkai in English would be more accurate if it engaged with the translations as translations — if it discussed Szirtes's and Mulzet's interpretive choices, if it compared the two translators' approaches, if it attended to the specific moves the translators have made in producing the English versions. The criticism that does this work is, in English, mostly absent. The work is harder to do, requires either the Hungarian or willingness to engage with the translator's notes and interviews, and operates at a level of specificity that the compressed reviewing economy cannot accommodate. But the work is necessary if the writer's actual nature is to be described.
What the achievement amounts to
The achievement of Krasznahorkai in English is, in the end, an achievement of writer and translators together. The writer's project — the long-sentence prose, the metaphysical register, the structural ambition — has been brought into English in ways that have allowed it to be recognised, criticised, prized, and read. The translations are not, and cannot be, the originals. They are, however, English-language literary works of considerable accomplishment in their own right, and the Anglophone literary culture would be poorer without them.
The English Krasznahorkai is, in this sense, a real and substantial part of the contemporary English-language literary scene, even though he writes in Hungarian and is read by most of his Anglophone audience through translation. The category of Anglophone literature is, in the contemporary period, not adequately understood without the translated work that constitutes a substantial portion of what serious Anglophone readers actually engage with. The translators are, in this sense, working artists of contemporary Anglophone literature, even when their primary language work is conducted on materials produced in other languages. The recognition of their work has lagged behind the recognition of the writers they translate. The recognition needs to catch up.
The Krasznahorkai case is, in this respect, exemplary rather than exceptional. The same arguments could be made about the English Bolaño through Natasha Wimmer, the English Knausgaard through Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken, the English Zambra through Megan McDowell, the English Sebald through Anthea Bell and Michael Hulse. The contemporary Anglophone literary culture is, in significant measure, the work of translators, and the criticism that takes the culture seriously has to take the translators seriously. Krasznahorkai's English existence is one of the more striking cases. Reading him seriously means reading his translators, and reading them — which is to say, treating them as the working artists they are — is part of what reading translated literature now requires.
